 Hi there, my name is Paul Tannehill and this screencast is all about the basic settings for the Moodle assignment activity. As I'm sure you know, all Moodle activity types and resource types have got a settings page. Some are more or less complex than others. The Moodle assignment is probably the most heavily used activity type in Moodle because it is so versatile and you can use it for for a variety of configurations, a variety of submission types that your students can do. And so I figured it might be a good idea to go ahead and produce a video on the various settings. We're not going to cover everything on this settings page, but what we've found to be the most useful settings on this page. So this is a course that I've got set up. It isn't a teaching course. There are no students enrolled in this course whatsoever. It's just a course that exists solely for doing demonstrations and doing screencasts just like this. So in this course, I've already turned editing on in the upper right on the course home page. And then I click that add an activity or resource button. And then from there, I've taken, I made the choice to make a new assignment activity. And here we are. So now this takes you to the settings page for the for the new activity, the new assignment. And of course, the top link in any moodle activity or resource type is going to be the title of the of the link itself as it sits on the course home page. So this is what students are going to click on to you this this copy right here, which says week one homework, etc. The next field is always of course going to be the description field. And this is a very typical text input field within moodle that you might notice. I think I think it loads up like this actually. So if you want this second row of buttons, you can click that little down arrow is the top left of the all the buttons on the on the ticked input box. So basically, as you see right here, I've written out some copy that explains what students are supposed to be doing. And after reading the textbook reviewing the lecture, etc, etc. What I've also done is I've made a video version of myself basically reading this copy. So that's right down here. So let's just briefly check check that out. Hi there, for this assignment, you will have already read chapter two in the textbook, reviewed the lecture for this week and participated in the class assignment. At that point, I'd like you to create a basic outline for your underwater basket away from project. Okay, that's enough of that. Now how did I get that video in here though? So I'm not sure if you've noticed, but every time you have the opportunity in moodle to input text into the system into your course, or into, say, a description field for an activity or resource, or a forum post, it could be feedback from a grade that you've given a student on something. And all these buttons up here, look at this button right up here that says record video. So I use the record video feature to record this. It's a super easy way to insert, to record and insert a video into the actual text box. And also, if you don't want to be on video, or you want to do just audio, there's a record audio as well. So record audio, record video. There's a three minute time limit on there. And not just you can be using this feature, but your students as well. So what I'm saying is anytime any moodle user on the system has an opportunity to input text into a text input box, there's also the opportunity to record and deploy an audio and or a video. This could be handy, let's say, in a forum where you want your students maybe to do a little bit more than just typing text in or pasting text in from somewhere else. Maybe a short introduction video. So the the creativity juices get flowing there when you start exploring some of these buttons. So I encourage you to do that. So below all this stuff, essentially, I've given some student instructions here. And oftentimes, it might be obvious to you as the instructor, what the mechanical steps that you want your students to create a word doc, let's say, or a PDF and upload that or type text into moodle, and submit that into the moodle assignment activity. But your students may or may not be clear on that, especially when it comes to all of your students. Most of your students may have already taken other moodle courses. Some may not. So they might be just sitting there reading what you've written up here, what you've said in the video and go, Okay, now what do I do? So it's good to have some some indication to your students of what you want them to do in order to successfully make their submission in here. And on a side note, I do happen to have a course another another non teaching course, full of various activity types. There's a lot of assignment activities in my course that have got student instructions already laid out there for you. And if you're interested, I can enroll you in my course in the faculty observer importer role, which will enable you to copy, make a copy of any or all of the activities in my course, copy them to your course and take them and run with them. So you got kind of a turnkey solution. In regard to having the student instructions already in an activity. So we've covered the description field. Now there's another field you may or may not have noticed, called the activity instructions. Now Paul, why aren't we putting these student instructions that are in the description field? Why don't we put them in the activity instruction field? Well, I'm not sure why moodle is configured this way. And this is the moodle system itself that we have no control over that I found yet. But these activity instructions only become visible to your students after they have clicked on the Add Submission button. And I figure the Add Submission button is one of the instructions you want your students to be doing. So I wish they were going to be visible before they click that the Add Submission button. But I've been recommending since this field came out until they change things to just ignore it because you can just put this in the instructions for your students in the description field. Okay, below all that here is where if you wanted to supply some kind of file or say a supplemental file or files that may not exist elsewhere, you may be using a Google Doc that you could just easily reference with a link to the Google Doc up here in the description field. But if not, if you want to deliver a file or files to your students, then you can do so right there. Below that field is the availability area. And so you can choose I think these are the device this whole this whole activity is set up right now at the default level. So these were enabled, these allow submissions from the due date, remind me to grade by and I will show description. These were already enabled when I created this activity a few minutes ago. So you can choose to enable or disable any or all of these as you want to other pretty self explanatory. And if not, if you're not sure what one of these features mean, always notice the little little question mark here, which you can get an explanation to any of these settings just by clicking the question mark, we will be doing some of that here. So the submission types, the file submission, the course is obviously you have your students create a word doc or a PDF, etc. If you want them to also be able to type in some text or paste in some text from somewhere else, you can enable that. So select these as you want to and you got those all set. If you're going to allow file submissions, it might be good to choose from a list of all available file types that your students can hypothetically upload as a submission, you don't want your students uploading a file that ideally that the Moodle system itself can't digest. So what I'm going with this is that I usually recommend to click this grade choose button. And then in the document files area, I usually recommend PDFs, RTFs, and the word doc types. I think in the image files, I usually recommend all the JPEG types. And I'll tell you why again, you're in a sec. Let's see, I think PNG is be fine. That's pretty much it. And that can cut that covers a lot of ground when it comes to easy file formats that your students can create for you to they can submit that into the Moodle system into the assignment activity for you to grade. And these are the file types that the Moodle grading interface is going to be able to show you a rendering of your student submission. If they happen to let's just say they happen to submit some other weird file type, maybe a word perfect file or, or, you know, any of these others, the Moodle system isn't going to be able to show you that it creates a temporary PDF for you when you go to grade, and you want it to be as easy as possible. So you don't have to necessarily download a file. If you don't follow this restriction process, as I'm thinking of it here, your students could hypothetically upload a file of a type that Moodle cannot digest and cannot show you in the Moodle grading interface, it'll give you a link. Oh, here's the link to that weird file format that you're then going to have to download and figure out, you know, what to do with it. So make it easy on yourself. And just list these file types is what my recommendation is. And these will also be visible to your students if they attempt to upload a file that's not one of these file types, the system won't allow it to upload there. So that's a recommendation right there. These feedback types are usually left alone. You can this is where you enable a fee of a text input field to input feedback to your students on Hey, you did a good job. The second paragraph was a little bit wonky, but you know what I'm saying here. And you could also provide an annotated PDF. And if you have a question, what what that means again, there's that question mark. So the submission settings in this next area down below usually work as is. But if you want your students to click a final submission button, that's what that means. And if you want them to accept a submission statement, that's what that means. And if you want additional attempts available, here's what that means. So again, these these little question marks here really clarify a lot that you may not have noticed these before. Let's see here, what are the next heavily used items here? I don't know that we got a lot of people, a lot of instructors enabling these notification settings, but they're available if you want. Turn it in is on as a whole other screencast, essentially, you can, as you see right now enabling turn it in is turned off by default. But you could you can enable it here. So that is one of three ways we have of of using turn it in here at LBCC the the Moodle assignment activity, which is what this is again, you can use turn it in directly from not have your students go to turn it in.com. There's also a turn it in activity type within Moodle as well. But again, that's a whole of screencast. So moving down below that, the grade area of course is important. A very typical configuration would be to to remain on point values here. You can indicate how many points it's worth. This is by far the most popular grading method, but there are other grading methods here. I rubric is kind of cool, we can show that at another screencast. If you've already created categories in your grade book, which we recommend before you create your activities. Here's the assignment activity, assignment activity is already created in our in our course grade book. By the way, that's in your grade book setup page in your in your grades area. So 10 points is the maximum grade, let's say if you want to indicate a grade to pass, probably going to be about seven. And you have other available features as well that are not used, you know, hardly at all. Moving on down here, restricting access here. So remember how up here I had mentioned after reading chapter two, reviewing the lecture, participating in the class discussion, each of those things if you want can be represented in your Moodle course. And you would if you wanted to have let's say it was in those that sequence, I don't remember what the first and second and third thing were up there. But let's say that this was the fourth thing in a series of things you want your students to be doing in a sequence, and they can't do the second one till they've done the first one, they can't do the third thing until they've done the second thing and so forth. And maybe this assignment might be the fourth thing. If you want to add an activity restriction, you click add restriction, and activity completion. And that's where you just essentially point before your students can get to this activity, they must have, they must have already completed a previous activity. So I don't have many activities in this course. But if I did, if there was one for the discussion for my suspension, where you've required your students to make a post, let's say whatever. That's how you can do a little daisy chain. Again, if you have the questions about the details of that process, you can get with us. So I mentioned activity completion for that form earlier. So activity completion is not enabled for this particular assignment activity so far. But if I wanted it to be, I'd usually choose when conditions are met. I would usually choose, I wouldn't even bother with the student must make a submission, I would usually choose something along the lines of they must receive a grade. So that then receiving a grade necessarily means they have made a submission. And it also means they have viewed it. And if I'm requiring activity completion to be enabled, when they receive a grade, I might consider also and they've received a passing grade. So that might be my thinking there. Activity completion is one thing that you could use to contribute to course completion, which is a whole other thing to cover there as well too. So that's that would be my personal choice for a typical if I wanted to follow those protocols. Outcomes is really the last thing on the bottom here. And we have a whole help guide on outcomes and I'll post that here. But essentially this is where you could you will have previously needed to attach an outcome set to the course itself and they'll appear in this list here. And let's say this would this would fulfill either partially or fully fulfill one or more of the outcomes they would be listed here. And then I can just indicate let's say this one activity would legitimately fulfill a given outcome in your course, you make your selection there. And then upon activity completion, which again, is this up here, you can just say complete the outcome just like that. Then of course now once you're done, I think it might be worth it, especially if this is the first time that you are adding an activity, let's say possibly among a series of activities in your course. Let's again, this might be the week one assignment, let's say, and we've paid close attention, of course, to all of these settings. We've got these settings just the way we want them. And when we get to thinking about creating the week two activity, are we going to want to create the week two activity from scratch, or maybe as a duplicate of this one. So as I wrap up here, I'm going to click save and return to course. And then here is the assignment we just created. Let's pretend now I wanted to duplicate it because the settings are just the way I want for the week one week two week three activity. Let's say oops, at this point, I realized I need to move this. So I can do that first do that right there. Okay, there it is. And now I want to duplicate this. So editing is still turned on up here on the upper right. And these three dots the kebab menu, that's where I can go to duplicate it. And it goes on and on from there. So basically, I hope you've got a good understanding now of the basics of the Moodle assignment activity settings. And so if you have any questions on what what a particular aspect of the settings page does, again, I encourage you to click those little those little question mark icons. And of course, you're always welcome to give us a jingle or I'd say send us an email at LMS dash admins dash lb at Lynn Benton.edu. I hope you enjoyed this screencast and got something out of it. Enjoy Moodle and have a great term.